Preventable Disease Articles
Justice in the Waiting Room
- By Erina K. Ludwig
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A few years back, when I lived in Nashville, I went with a friend to a low-income neighborhood clinic. The idea of the clinic was to provide people with medical care at low or no cost. Some had Medicaid, while others had Medicare, but for others this one trip would mean the difference between how many and what kinds of meals their entire family would have for the rest of the month. It would mean the difference between paying all the bills or choosing the most important ones. Read more...
Counting the Cost
- By Jena Nardella
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I have always had a hard time with mental math. As a kid, I added up sums by using 20 fingers and toes, countless smeared penned tally marks on my palms and on the backs of my hands, with liberal doses of ardent wishful thinking. As an adult, I still rely on counting digits because I fail to see the relationships between inert and impersonal numbers. I understand math rules, but the neutralities of numbers such as 7,000,000,000; 325,000,000; 11,400,000,000; 2,400; 40; 1,427; 1,000, 600,000, and 1, sit on the page with emotionless drab and yet beg to be understood with passion and reality. Numbers alone often fail to create the poetry and meaning that they’re intended to represent. I have learned, however, that when you take these numbers and put them within context and place, these numbers actually tell a story. Read more...
Rejecting the AIDS Stigma
- By Lauren Seibert
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I’m 22, and I care about AIDS. Nothing shocking there, right? Wrong. Working with World Vision, one of the biggest Christian humanitarian organizations in existence, has shown me that things are not so simple. Read more...
Water: A Matter of Life and Death
- By Patricia Patyrak
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Editor's note: Today is World Water Day, a day designated to acknowledge the global clean water shortage and promote conversations about how we can make better use of the limited amounts we have. Here, Patricia Patyrak writes about the fluidity of water as it crosses borders from nourishment into preventable disease, and the vital importance of this natural resource. There is a silent and deadly problem in this world that kills more people every year than any form of violence or disease. It does not discriminate against age, gender or ethnicity, but claims the lives of nearly thousands every day. This silent killer is contaminated water. Read more...
Preparing the Way for Hope
- By Becca McGowan
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Ten years ago, Joan Smith started to take peanut butter sandwiches to some of the hungry children of Amaoti, the largest informal settlement in Kwa-Zulu Natal, on the eastern coast of South Africa. More than 13,000 households live there, and the hillside is populated by colourful shacks made from plastics, scrap metal and mud, densely nestled cheek to cheek. Many have only one room and house entire families. They are mostly bare, containing a few, cherished possessions—old calendars and newer posters on the walls, a few pots and pans, a mat on the floor. No mattresses, no cooking facilities (as we conceive of “kitchens” in the West), nowhere private to wash, no toilet. Read more...
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Diagnosing the Roots of AIDS
- By Adam Taylor
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Underneath every injustice and crisis are layers of root causes. These complexities can often be paralyzing and overwhelming. My wife has become obsessed with the proliferation of crime and detective shows that clutter prime-time television, including CSI Miami and New York, NUMB3RS, Cold Case, etc. While I'm far from an expert or avid watcher, I'm amazed by our culture's infatuation with crimes and solving mysteries. Most of the shows are adaptations of real-life cases, modified and often exaggerated for a television audience. In almost every show we see a crime take place, then a flashback that provides clues around the motives behind the crime and who the culprit may be. Apprehending the criminal requires careful questioning of witnesses and suspects, meticulous analysis of evidence and an often elaborate mapping out of the connection between seemingly disparate clues. Read more...
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Silencing the Roar
- By Tom Davis
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Jeffrey Sachs, Director of The Millennium Project, tells an amazing story about an AIDS clinic in Malawi. On one side of the hall, people are dying three to a bed. Family members sit with their loved ones during their last moments, watching them succumb to an opportunistic infection. But on the other side of the hall is a different story. Read more...
Ashamed to Die in the South
- By Andrew J. Skerritt
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While the world’s attention has mostly turned to the AIDS epidemic in other parts of the world, cases of HIV and AIDS continue to rise among the African-American community in the South in the United States. In fact, of the top 10 states with the highest percentage of African-Americans who have AIDS, eight are in the South. Journalist Andrew J. Skerritt tells the story of some of the major players in the fight against AIDS, as well as the stories of those who’ve succumbed to the disease, in the South in his book, Ashamed to Die. In this excerpt, he describes leaving the hospital room of Carolyn Starr, a woman who led a troubled life and died of AIDS far too young, and he gives some background on this lesser known issue. Read more...
A More Potable Existence
- By Kate Hegland Kardol
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Slipping out of my shoes, I step over the bare, concrete doorframe and into the modest home. I notice my surroundings—a single room with a concrete floor, a few baskets cast about filled with daily rations of rice and posho, a small clothesline hung displaying the day’s washing, and two young boys standing proudly next to their water filter, as if it was a trophy recently won. Read more...
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